The Italians have a saying, Lemon: 'Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.' And, although they've never won a war or mass-produced a decent car, in this area they are correct."

We are an immigrant nation! The first generation works their fingers to the bone making things, the next generation goes to college and innovates new ideas, the third generation... snowboards and takes improv classes.

My God, Lemon, your breath! When did you find time to eat a diaper you found on the beach?

I'll drop you off at the airport then I'll swing by MSNBC. I have to talk to Rachel Maddow. Only one of us can have this haircut

There are no bad ideas Lemon, only great ideas that go horribly wrong

I love my mother, Lemon, obviously because of Stockholm Syndrome

Good God! Lemon, those jeans make you look like a Mexican sports reporter!

What happened in your childhood to make you believe people are good?

You know what they should do with people like her? They should round them all up and put them on an island. Oh, wait, they already have. It's called Manhattan

Meditation is a waste of time, like learning French or kissing after sex

What keeps people polite on airplanes? A shared hatred for the CBS sitcoms they're forced to watch

As long as (my mother is) in New York, I'm doing absolutely nothing. I got the idea from watching your President Obama the last four years

What do we elites do when we screw up? We pretend it never happened and give ourselves a giant bonus

Thanks for telling me what I already know. You should work for the Huffington Post

Female jealousy is an evolutionary fact, Lemon. If you try to breed it out of them you end up with a lesbian with hip dysplasia

While sitting in a chair, move your right foot in clockwise circles. Then, while doing this, draw the number “6″ in the air with your right pointer finger. Most likely your foot will start moving the other way. ..."Kristen" at the Fox Vox blog, August, 2003

An example of the stuff I find when doing research within the Change of Subject archives.

Family info: Two wonderful parents, one amazing sister, zero children (I hope)

Resides: Macomb, IL

Political philosophy: Fiscally conservative, socially liberal, more on some issues than others. Basically there are some things that are no one's business but our own. Registered Republican, but have voted for the other party when the hypocrisy level is too high or the competence level is too low. Recovering evangelical who is no longer religious and attends mainline church only for socializing and doughnuts.

Jim Nabors, the Hawaii resident well known for his starring role in the 1960s television sitcom "Gomer Pyle, USMC," married his longtime male partner early this month, he told Hawaii News Now Tuesday. Nabors, 82, said he married his companion of 38 years, Stan Cadwallader, who's 64, in Seattle on Jan. 15.

Hadiya, who last week performed at President Barack Obama's inaugural festivities (below), was killed when a gunman opened fire on a group of students at Harsh Park, just blocks from King College Prep and about a mile from Obama's home in Kenwood on the South Side....

Hadiya was hanging out with her volleyball team at Harsh Park after taking exams Tuesday afternoon. About a dozen teens had taken shelter under a canopy during a rainstorm when a boy or man jumped a fence in the park, ran toward them and opened fire around 2:20 p.m. ....

Though only a sophomore, Hadiya had aspirations to become a pharmacist or a journalist...... Because she couldn't decide, family encouraged her to do both with a possible double major. She had interest in attending Northwestern University...

I attempted to tackle this question fairly in a column nine years ago. The conclusion:

When (the truck driver who'd paid a bribe to get his license) didn't pull over to check his rig (after other motorists tried to warn him), it was the last link in a chain of failures and oversights that included the company that made the part that fell off (striking the Willis family van and causing the tragic wreck), the company that leased the chassis, the company that maintained the chassis, the company that supervised Guzman, the company that oversaw dispatching in the truck yard and the company that installed an insufficiently shielded gas tank on its line of mini-vans, each of which paid at least $1 million and as much as $50 million to settle the Willis suit.

The assumption that an ordinarily competent trucker would have heeded the warnings Guzman received makes the secretary of state's office under Ryan a key link in that chain.

Not to minimize or to magnify that link, just to put it in perspective: A little more good and a little less bad anywhere along the line and those kids would be alive today.

This location only? Not that long ago there was a Blockbuster Video roughly a mile from our house in all four directions. This one -- in the Six Corners shopping district -- is (soon was) the last one. We helped kill it by using Redbox, Netflix, iTunes streaming video and Amazon video.

It strikes me as quite likely I'll never set foot in another Blockbuster again. And aside from the regrettable loss of jobs, I'm not sorry or sentimental about it.

Anyone in the comment community still a regular at one of the remaining Blockbuster outlets?

Looks like Harris, who is quite new to politics, is going to drop out and endorse Kelly in the Democratic 2nd U.S. Congressional District primary to replace Jesse Jackson Jr. Polling must have told him that voters didn't consider him ready for such a promotion.

When you say you're anti-mass incarceration, are there any specific instances you're referring to outside terror states, China, or other totalitarian regimes?

Dr. X added:

I assumed you were talking about the country with both the highest number of prisoners and the highest rate of incarceration--the U.S What has especially troubled me about the US is privatization of prisons, which has naturally led to lobbying against changes in laws that would reduce incarceration rates. So we have people who are profiting from imprisonment spending a great deal of money to make sure we continue to imprison more people than any other nation in the world. I find that morally perverse. Also, the war on drugs? Thoughts?'

Boris Gendelev chimed in:

If I were really paranoid, I would say that incarceration is the way the government makes unemployment appear lower. Let's have a War against the War on Drugs!

Terry McG:

It is the failed war on drugs that leads to these high incarceration rates, no question in my mind. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens in what will become the social experimentation states of CO and WA.

Dienne:

Terry,what do you think motivates the "war on drugs"? You'd think there would be bi-partisan agreement against it. It's costing us many billions, so you'd think the "fiscal responsibility" people would be against it. And liberals are supposed to be live and let live types, so they should, in theory, be opposed to it. But yet, the more the general population turns against the war on drugs, the more the powers that be, whether Democrat or Republican, dig in. Why do you think that is?

Terry McG:

It is a bit of a 3rd rail, y'know? I think part of the problem is the term "war", which means the populace doesn't want to concede defeat. Wars on this, wars on that, it all means so very little. And it diminishes the true meaning of the word. But much of it has to do with money and peoples' natural inclination to preserve the status quo.

And then Edge of the 14th Ward joined in:

I was thinking specifically of the drug war when I mentioned mass incarceration. I think it makes no sense to lock up non-violent offenders for "crimes" that many of us (including our last three presidents) have committed. It's a waste of resources, it destroys communities, and it fuels what has become an incredibly violent power struggle in Mexico. But even beyond the drug war, I think we should take a hard look at our prison policies. We have an unconscionable incarceration rate. Does anyone believe Americans are vastly more prone to criminality, compared to people in other countries? Or that we're significantly safer because we lock up so many people? And that's to say nothing of ugly racial disparities, the awful commonality of prison rape (i.e. cruel and unusual punishment), and our seeming inability to rehabilitate prisoners while they're in prison, or to reintegrate them into society once they've served their time.

He joined the general call for a separate thread to continue this conversation and so, now that I'm back from my appointment with the foot doctor, here it is!

I'm not sure what the more conservative members of the CoS community think about David Frum, former Bush 43 speechwriter who's now on the outs with movement types, but here is some of what he has to say in a fascinating Daily Beast essay "Are Republican Moderates Useless?"

Tea Party Republicans terrified the country. In 2011, they came within inches of forcing an entirely unnecessary government default. In 2012, they campaigned on a platform of ending the Medicare guarantee for younger people (while preserving every nickel of it for the Republican-voting constituencies over age 55) in order to finance a big tax cut for the richest Americans. Through the whole period 2009-2012, senior Republicans engaged in strident rhetoric of a kind simply not used by major party figures since the demise of Burton K. Wheeler and Alben Barkley. “Death panels” and “Ground Zero mosques”; Michele Bachman, Herman Cain and Donald Trump taking turns as the Republican front-runner; speakers of state legislatures praying for the death of the president and a former speaker of the House denouncing the president as a Kenyan anti-colonial alien to the American experience—we could fill this page with examples of important Republicans currying favor with their voting base by behaving in ways that the non-base would regard as reckless, racist, or just plain repellent...

The big winners under the American fiscal system are the elderly, the
rural, and the affluent—Republican constituencies. It’s not easy to
balance the budget or shrink government spending to any significant
degree in ways that don’t pinch Republican voters much harder than they
pinch Democratic voters.

And regarding the continual bleating from the right about vanishing liberties and imperiled freedom, he notes:

As a matter of daily experience, more Americans of all races and both
sexes face fewer legal constraints upon their ability to live as they
please than ever before in the nation’s history

In what amounts to a companion piece in the New Republic, Jonathan Chait writes:

In 2008, John McCain advocated a cap-and-trade bill to control climate change, but McCain and all his GOP allies abandoned it, and even turned against the whole notion of attempting to limit carbon emissions. (Among the public, the percentage of Republicans saying they believed that there was “solid evidence” that the Earth’s temperature was increasing fell from 59 percent in 2006 to 35 percent in 2009.) The party had previously advocated monetary and fiscal stimulus in response to an economic slowdown, but under Obama it dusted off obscure theories previously associated only with Ron Paul and the party’s fringe. The health-care reform approach developed by Romney in Massachusetts, which Romney himself had advocated as a national model during his 2008 presidential campaign to barely any complaint from within his party, now became a socialist horror.

Occupation: Nonprofit communications, currently
on behalf of a child welfare agency that specializes in foster care
adoption.

Family info: Married for three years to a
woman I've known for ten years. We are unapologetic cat people. No
kids (yet). I'm an only child who was raised by my parents and my
maternal grandparents in the same house. The adults in my family were
a mix of devout Catholic, lapsed Catholic, and intermittently
practicing Buddhist.

o borrow a football metaphor, a federal appeals court threw the flag
last week against the president of the United States for unsportsmanlike
conduct.

Specifically, a three-judge panel in the Washington, D.C., circuit
ruled that President Barack Obama's "recess" appointments of three
members of the National Labor Relations Board were invalid because they
never received the constitutionally required "consent" of the U.S.
Senate.

Administration-backed lawyers had argued unsuccessfully that it's a
time-honored, common practice for presidents to sneak appointees into
office while the Senate is in extended adjournment and technically not
available to give or withhold consent.

Ronald Reagan did it 240 times. George W. Bush and his father, George
H.W. Bush, combined, did it 248 times. Bill Clinton did it 139 times.

The referees on the court didn't buy the "...but everybody does it!" argument.

Their opinion noted that the provision for such appointments in the Constitution refers to "the
recess," of the Senate (emphasis added), meaning the break between
formal sessions of the chamber and not any old vacation period, long
weekend or lunch break.

"We will not do violence to the Constitution by ignoring the framers'
choice of words," it sniffed, if a court opinion can be said to sniff.

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

It is undisputed that the purported appointments of the three members were not made “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate.”

This does not, however, end the dispute.

The Board (NLRB) contends that despite the failure of the President to comply with Article II, Section 2, Clause 2, he nonetheless validly made the appointments under a provision sometimes referred to as the “Recess Appointments Clause,” which provides that “[t]he President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.”

Noel Canning contends that the putative recess appointments are invalid and the Recess Appointments Clause is inapplicable because the Senate was not in the recess at the time of the putative appointments and the vacancies did not happen during the recess of the Senate. We consider those issues in turn.

The Chicago Republican Party, in partnership with the City’s
Republican Committeemen of the second congressional district, is
sponsoring a debate of the Republican congressional candidates seeking
to fill the vacant seat of Jesse Jackson Jr.

Willie Mae Cole (the sister of murder victim Benjamin Cole) told (Cook County Judge Arthur) Hill Monday she missed getting “high fives” from
her brother and smelling the pungent smell pouring through his skin
after he nibbled on onions and garlic....Sun-Times

Former San Francisco 49ers and Oakland Raiders offensive tackle Kwame
Harris was charged with assaulting his ex-boyfriend at a Bay Area
restaurant during an argument involving soy sauce and underwear. The
alleged victim, Dimitri Geier, also filed a civil suit against Harris.
The suit claims that Harris got upset when Geier poured soy sauce on a
plate of rice and later pulled Geier's pants down and accused him of
stealing his underwear....Tribune

What’s a health incentive – and what’s a penalty? In the past few
days, the perennial debate has reared its head again; as the start of
Obama’s second term has brought us closer to changes in the healthcare
system, a stream of dire news stories on what that might mean for some
Americans have inevitably cropped up.

Last week, the Associated Press warned ominously that starting next January, ”Millions of smokers could be priced out of health insurance
because of tobacco penalties in President Barack Obama’s health-care
law.” For insurance companies that opt to enforce the full amount, the
change could mean as much as a $5,000 premium spike per year for older
smokers.

I'm conflicted about this. It's galling to have to pay higher insurance premiums because of the increased health-care costs caused by smokers and others whose risky behavior makes them sicker and more often injured than, say, I am.

But this sentiment springing from my judgmental self conflicts with my strong belief in universal health care coverage, which by definition requires the suspension of judgment.

About "Change of Subject."

"Change of Subject" by Chicago Tribune op-ed columnist Eric Zorn contains observations, reports, tips, referrals and tirades, though not necessarily in that order. Links will tend to expire, so seize the day. For an archive of Zorn's latest Tribune columns click here. An explanation of the title of this blog is here. If you have other questions, suggestions or comments, send e-mail to ericzorn at gmail.com.
More about Eric Zorn

Contributing editor Jessica Reynolds is a 2012 graduate of Loyola University Chicago and is the coordinator of the Tribune's editorial board. She can be reached at jreynolds at tribune.com.